Thursday, May 2, 2013

On The Road To Eilat

ON THE
ROAD TO EILAT

(Before I forget,
I've been asked to announce that the long-awaited episodes of
Natania's tales of humor and woe can be found athttp://mylifeisacosmicjoke.blogspot.co.il/.)

At the end of the last
episode, we had averted a domestic catastrophe. Our apartment here
in Ma'ale Adumim would not be turned into a swimming pool, a car
wash, a mikvah, or a lake. The outfit that our insurance company
engaged to deal with our broken water pipe was set to come back to
replace the floor and wall tiles they had destroyed and fix the
gaping hole in the wall they had dug through. On a good day, they
might even do some painting.

To give them credit,
they were all set to do the fixing they had promised. Except for one
except. Barbara, in putting up a plastic sheet in the bathtub so we
could use the shower, noticed that there was a small drip coming
right before the bathtub faucets. Nothing to be alarmed about; but
there was no point to re-tiling the wall and sealing in this dripping
pipe. Let Alon-with-a-smile-and-a-song take a few minutes (that's
all it would take) to fix the problem first and then get on with it.
Our difficulty was explaining this to the contractor. They kept
calling us up to make an appointment to fix the tiles. And Barbara
kept telling them, No you have to fix the leak first. This
went on for several days, all the while we walked over the trench in
the floor on the way to the bathroom. I looked at it this way: if
we were on an archaeological dig or a safari, we would have been more
than content with our lodgings. At least we didn't have to go out in
the hall or to a neighbor's to go to the loo. And.......Barbara and
I would be going to Eilat in a few days.

The jaunt down to Eilat
was Tina's idea. Why don't we all do something together as a
family? The original idea was
for the five of us, me, Barbara, Tina, David, and Natania, to take a
few days and head off to Eilat. Because Tina and David are working
(someone has to!), they opted for a long weekend, from Thursday to
Sunday morning. OK, but what about Natania? The weekend we decided
on was supposed to coincide with a break in her classes. Sad to say,
she mis-read her schedule and then one of her teachers rescheduled a
final exam; so in the end, she wound up staying home, along with
Cookie and Moby, our two Tonkinese cats.

The
only real obstacle to this plan was me. There is often someone in a
family who has to be overly concerned with the family's finances. My
self-assigned task is to assume that any planned trip or excursion is
too expensive and that we can't afford it; or that we should spend
the money on something more mundane, like a coffee table. It is
Barbara's responsibility to convince me otherwise. She is well
schooled in the art of persuasion. Her gambit this time was to
consider this vacation a combination Chanukah, wedding anniversary,
her birthday, and my birthday present. Well, if you put it that
way......

Who
would have known that this would be a perfect time to get away and
leave our worries – our broken wall and torn up floor – behind?
The plan was as follows: Tina and David would take an El Al flight
from the old terminal one at Ben Gurion Airport, arriving in Eilat in
the early afternoon. (Travel time about one hour.) Barbara and I
would take the 10 o'clock bus from the Central Bus Station in
Jerusalem, which would get down there around 3PM.

There
is some information that many people know, but no one thinks to share
with you. For example: we got to the bus station about half an hour
early. Normally for an inter-city Egged bus, you can buy your
tickets when you get on. But we figured we have plenty of
time, we might as well go to the ticket booths and buy them in
advance. So we waited our turn,
and Barbara asked the clerk for two tickets to Eilat on the 10AM bus.
“Ein makom,” was
his reply. No more room on the bus. When, pray tell, would there be
makom? The 5PM bus.
Being the helpful sort, he suggested we travel first to another city,
say Tel Aviv or Beersheba, where there would be makom
on a bus to Eilat. To give you a sense of what was happening, you
need to understand that at this time of the morning there was only
one ticket booth open. You can probably figure out on your own that
there was a long and growing line behind us. And you can assume, if
you know anything about the temperament of the average Israeli, that
some or most of them were quite impatient. Someone – that's us –
was holding up the works. We probably would have been better off
going down to Beersheba, which is on the way. But the helpful clerk
reserved us two seats on a bus leaving Tel Aviv at about 1PM. He
also took the trouble to book us two seats going back to Jerusalem
from Eilat on Sunday in the early afternoon. We had made no friends
by taking so long, but we did have our seats. We scampered off the
line, heading for the bus to Tel Aviv. The thing is that when we
related this incident later on, a number of people seemed to know
that you have to reserve your seats in advance if you're going to
Eilat. Well, next time we'll know too.

Now
it could have been a lot worse. We could have wound up getting to
Eilat the next day, Friday – just in time for Shabbat – in which
case there wouldn't have been much point in going. We could have
wound up not getting there at all. As it turned out, we would arrive
Thursday in time for dinner. It just meant a long day traveling for
us and, horror of horrors, having to spend an hour and a half in the
“new” bus station in Tel Aviv – the one we never, ever want go
to, if we have a choice.

Natania
read somewhere recently that the “architect” (I use the term
loosely) who designed this nightmare, this stain on the city's
reputation, had just died, and there's this thing about not speaking
badly about the deceased. I just hope for his sake that his coffin
is more accommodating than the bus station he designed for the rest
of us. At least it must be harder to get lost in. We were able to
find some kosher food there (in the depot, not the coffin), and we
whiled away the hour and a half until departure time. We did find
out when we finally boarded the bus that the seats actually are
reserved, as they are on an airplane. A nice young chayelet
told us we were sitting in hers; ours, we discovered, were farther
back. Everyone scrambled on board, and finally we were off to Eilat.

If
you're going to go by bus, even though it's longer, the route from
Tel Aviv is a lot more scenic. The bus heads south and then zig-zags
its way through the hills down to Beersheba before the road merges
with route 90, the coastal road which goes from Mount Hermon down to
Eilat. (It's sort of like The Garden State Parkway, which goes from
the New York border all the way down to Cape May.) Because of all
the late rain, the ground was a sea of green even south of Beersheba,
the traditional entrance into the Negev, where grass is traditionally
scarcer than a viable peace plan. The other thing I noticed was how
much of this turf the Bedouins were squatting on. Let's just say
that right now that this land-grab is a small elephant in a room.
But the elephant is getting bigger and bigger, and, goodness knows,
the room isn't.

Many
hours, a few stops along the way to pick up more passengers, and one
pit stop later, our bus pulled into the small, unprepossessing depot
in the downtown center of Eilat. I had never been down to this port,
which Ben Gurion had the good sense to capture prior to the ceasefire
in 1948. Barbara had been there with her mother in the early 1970's,
when nothing much was happening there. Things were a lot different
last year when she stayed overnight with a tour group going to Petra
(Jordan is one of the many countries that I don't “do.”) Tina
gets to do a lot of traveling for her job, all over Europe and such,
but there are no medical conferences schedules for Eilat (only auto
races and chamber music festivals), so neither she nor David had been
there either. When they got off their plane, they simply walked to
our hotel, about five or ten minutes away. The bus depot is a little
bit farther away, so we needed a taxi (and there are lots of them in
Eilat!) to get us there.

Why
did we stay at the Astral Seaside, one of a small chain of hotels in
Eilat (they didn't build them; they took over a number of hotels from
different chains, so each one was different). Barbara had stayed at
another Astral on the way to Petra and was duly impressed with the
food. So she was amenable to the suggestion by someone at Zion Tours
(a highly recommended outfit, by the way) that the Seaside would be a
good option, not too pricey and, as its name suggests, right by the
beach. Like most or all of the hotels down in this resort town, the
kitchen was suitably kosher. Tina and David, as I said, had arrived
hours before and were just “chilling,” having taking a stroll
along the beachfront. We, to our great relief, were just in time for
dinner. Our vacation had officially begun, and none too soon.

About Me

I made aliyah in the summer of 2007 along with my wife Barbara,one daughter, Natania, and an elderly cat named Mimi (now deceased)to Ma'ale Adumim, a community of about 40,000 Jewish souls -- a little bit east of Yerushalayim. (My other daughter, Tina, made aliyah on her own a few weeks before we did and is living and working in Tel Aviv -- along with her new husband, David.) I will be learning Hebrew, working on this blog as well as other writings, and continuing to do traditional and now digital photography as I have been doing for almost 40 years.